Debra Granik Quotes

I've always had a complex relationship towards my identity as an American.

My fiction occupies, actually, the very heart of American culture: this eternal question and struggle of what it means to be an American.

My parents were French and Irish and our family even has Spanish blood-and I do so love the United States and consider myself part American.

The other aspect of American identity worth focusing on is the concept of America as a nation of immigrants. That certainly is a partial truth. But it is often assumed to be the total truth.

In a sense I've made the same film over and over again. In all of them I've asked, 'Who are we as Americans?

I find myself increasingly forced to think of my ethnic identity instead of the national identity I adopted as a boy in 1976. That is discomfiting for me, and a tragedy for America.

I don't necessarily feel like I'm American. I wouldn't know what that feels like.

I love my heritage. I'm very proud of being Cuban. But I clearly understand that I am an American first.

Some call me a Cuban hyphen American. I reject that. I don't believe in hyphenated Americans.

It may be the optimist in me, but I think America has a uniquely powerful and capacious glue internally. The American identity has always been ethnically and religiously neutral, so within one generation you have Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, Chinese-Americans, Jamaican-Americans - they feel American. It's a huge success story.

It's a complicated issue, but I define myself as an American, primarily.

I've always wanted to be able to say that I come from Los Angeles, California and feel quintessentially American - even if I said that in Spanish.

I'm so proud of my Chinese ancestry, but I was born and raised in America, and I really believe in American values, our American system, our freedom, our liberties.

I feel Anglo-American.

You can be a Polish American, or an Arab American, or a Greek American but you can't be English American. Why not?

Nationality is a very curious thing. The blood is Scots and the temperament is Scots, but I am, in fact, 100% American.

I struggled with being a Latino growing up in Los Angeles. I felt very American. I still do. I went to 35 bar mitzvahs before I went to a single quinceanera. I could talk all day about my culture and what it means to me.

I became an American in 2006. It got me thinking about what is my America and what's my perception of America.

No encouragement must be given to social and political organizations or methods which perpetuate in this country foreign ideas and customs. An Irish-American, a German-American, or a French-American vote is an intolerable anomaly.

It is a complex fate being an American.

We [native-born] could not choose, but they [immigrants] could and did choose to be Americans.

These natives prefer the name of Americans to that of Creoles, since the peace of Versailles, and particularly since 1789, one often hears them say with pride: “I am not a Spaniard, I am an American.”

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism…. The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.

We used to have a view that to really be a good Australian, to love Australia, you almost had to cut your links with the country of origin. But I don’t think that was right and it never was right.

I'm very proud being Puerto Rican. I'm American. That is what America is made of - people from different lands.